“There’s your future home, old man.  Keep a stiff upper lip.  You’ll need all your grit.”

CHAPTER XII

Fred Starratt rested surprisingly well that first night.  But two weeks in the detention hospital had taken the sting out of institutional preliminaries.  The officials at Fairview put him through precisely the same paces, except upon a somewhat larger scale.  There was the selfsame questioning, the same yielding up of personal effects, the same inevitable bath.  And almost the same solitary room, except that this one peered out upon the free world through a heavily barred window instead of through a skylight, and boasted a kitchen chair.  He was to be alone then!...  He thanked God for this solitude and slept.

He awoke at six o’clock to the clipped shriek of a whistle.  Shortly after, a key turned in his door.  There followed the sound of scores of bare feet pattering up and down the hall.  Was it imagination or did these muffled footfalls have an inhuman softness?...  Suddenly his door flew open.  He shrank beneath the bedclothes, peering out with one unscreened eye.

A knot of gesticulating and innocent madmen were gazing at him with all the simplicity of children.  After a few moments, their curiosity satisfied, they pattered on their ghostly way again.

This, he afterward learned, was the daily morning inspection of newcomers.

Presently the whistle blew again and a bell sounded through the corridors.  A rush of answering feet swept past; a great silence fell.

A half hour later a monstrous man with glittering eyes and clawlike fingers came in, carrying breakfast—­a large dishpan filled with a slimy mush, two slices of dry bread, and a mound of greasy hash.  Fred turned away with a movement of supreme disgust.  The gigantic attendant laughed.

There came a call of, “All outside!” echoing through the halls; a rush of feet again, a hushed succeeding silence.  The half-mad ogre went to the window and slyly beckoned Fred to follow.  He crawled out of bed and took his place before the iron bars.  The man pointed a skinny finger; Fred’s gaze followed.  He found himself looking down upon a stone-paved yard filled with loathsome human wreckage—­gibbering cripples, drooling monsters, vacant-eyed corpses with only the motions of life.  Some had their hands strapped to their sides, others were almost naked.  They sang, shouted, and laughed, prayed or were silent, according to their mental infirmities.  It was an inferno all the more horrible because of its reality, a relentless nightmare from which there was no awakening.

Fred heard the man at his side chuckling ferociously.

His tormentor was laughing with insane cruelty.  “The bull pen!  Ha, ha, ha!”

Fred made his way back to his bed.  Midway he stopped.

“Does everybody ...” he began to stammer—­“does everybody ... or only those who ...”